Elizabeth Karavanas holds Sammy, one of her two cats, in her room at the emergency shelter at the Stony Point Center. / Seth Harrison/The Journal News

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Heather Lent holds a photo album as she sits in her room at the emergency shelter at the Stony Point Center on Wednesday. / Seth Harrison/The Journal News

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STONY POINT — With his mother, Jonathan Navas excitedly looked through piles of donated picture books and crayons left in front of the reception desk at Stony Point Center late Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m going to bring it to school,” the 8-year-old boy said, holding a set of crayons.

For nearly a month, Jonathan and his family have called the facility their temporary home because their trailer at Ba Mar Mobile Home Park was severely damaged during Superstorm Sandy. Angelica Navas, Jonathan’s mother, said she and her husband want to fix their home so the couple and their three children can move back in, but the renovation can’t start until the house gets rewired.

“Nobody can work there because we have no power,” she said.

Many homes at Ba Mar, as well as on Beach, Grassy Point and River roads in Stony Point, were devastated by flooding from Sandy.

A month after the storm, many of the displaced families, including the Navas family, are still struggling to get back on their feet while dealing with unfamiliar paperwork and bureaucracies.

This month, Stony Point Center, a Presbyterian conference and retreat facility with 180 beds, welcomed storm victims who initially stayed at the town’s emergency shelter at the Stony Point Ambulance Corps building on Route 9W.

About 30 families, or about 100 people, are still at the center. But they will have to vacate their rooms Friday morning because the center has been booked for a weekend conference.

Rick Ufford-Chase, co-director of Stony Point Center, said that for the past several days, caseworkers have been working with families to try to accelerate their recovery process.

The center also hosted a meeting Tuesday night to let people know that if they have nowhere else to go, the center will accommodate them, though they might have to sleep in cots when rooms are unavailable during some weekends.

“We are working right now to come up with the list. Right now it looks as if we’ll be able to continue to support probably as many as 15 or 18 of the families who still really need the help,” Ufford-Chase said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, prioritize who can move back out this week, and who really needs to stay.”

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The Friday deadline also was prompted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance Program, which originally was slated to expire Friday.

FEMA spokesman Gary Weidner said the assistance program has been extended to Dec. 14, and even when Stony Point Center is unavailable, eligible families can go to other designated facilities, such as Comfort Inn in Nanuet.

“Part of the issue is ... it’s not near Stony Point,” Weidner said. “Because of the fact that they are a community … they don’t want to spread out.”

Weidner said some Westchester residents were also in the assistance program, but he didn’t know how many families were participating.

Ufford-Chase said the process to find out whether each family is deemed “qualified” for FEMA’s sheltering program is not that simple, causing confusion among victims.

“We have to go through the system and test each family to see whether they are going to be qualified,” he said. “It’s actually pretty confusing to get through it.”

Ufford-Chase said at the end, only about half of the families who stayed at the center will qualify for the program, which would reimburse Stony Point Center for the cost.

Heather Lent, 33, said she and her husband, John Rivera, 45, are getting ready to move on while trying to cope with their devastating loss.

The couple, their three daughters and Lent’s grandmother have lived in a home on River Road, but with no flood insurance on it, the structure might be beyond repair because of the severity of the damage, Lent said.

“We got three feet of water, mixed with raw sewage from the sewer plant that overflowed,” Lent said.

“We have three holes in the foundation, and the front porch was completely ripped off of the house.”

The couple said that on Saturday, they hope to move into a rental apartment in Tomkins Cove with the small amount of money they received from FEMA and another grant — about $2,200 — as down payment.

“We lost everything,” Lent said, but added that the community, including Hudson Valley Humane Society, which has taken care of their two dogs, has been trying to help by donating necessities for the family, including clothes and shoes.